"Yes, I fancy I see what you are arriving at."
"I am not dramatising it, I am only trying to say it as shortly as possible. The lives of some of us may be abruptly ended or fearfully transformed to-morrow on the Tor. I feel I might not come down as I should go up. A deeper darkness seems moving against me all the time... just like the temple of Nyx I have sometimes imagined: only this is moving to surround me, not I into it. When light returns and dreary normalness begins again—as it always must—if I am still alive indeed... I think my existence to the present may be... gone. How could you—supposing that you escape, as, of all of us, you and mother might, Peter—but how could you sustain that everlasting mountain of self-reproach? ... Hugh was killed yesterday. His death, I say, was unpreventable. But if anyone had loved Hugh overmuch and had innocently contributed to his being on the Tor, could she ever forgive herself his death?"
"You are not to die," objected Peter sullenly.
"It hardly concerns the argument, what is to happen to me. If I am anyhow subjected while you go free, a dreadful self-poison must begin in you to-morrow night that may last with life itself and bring your art to nothing. So this must be settled first."
"You should have opposed us at once. To hold your hand as you did was rather too delicate and cunning a manœuvre to lie in your nature."
"I conceive it thus," interposed Saltfleet. "Miss Fleming's mind has been double. Its conscious part has been very weary, humble, and aloof, desiring not to intervene: but, underneath, it was in a manner aware that to-morrow evening's assembly was already invisibly established in futurity; and that part of her mind has been spinning out the time, to get the thing arranged while we should be here together. … This may be the actual truth. Yet we may have been listening less to an exposition of the truth than to—a sacrifice."
"What sacrifice?" demanded Peter.
"Of her apathy. And if you cannot apprehend, Mr. Copping, how, the will in a matter once being believed permanently stilled, its unexpected sharp resuscitation may represent the acceptance of sordidness and horror again—why then, I fear that Miss Fleming's return to activity will have proved too high for you. …"
Ingrid faced Arsinal, who, very pale, put his arms behind his back in waiting. She said:
"If there is any responsibility at all in this room, Mr. Copping is sharing it, and I will not come to a meeting."
"We shall none of us have been able to help a meeting."
"Then I will speak to you afterwards, Peter." ... She came back to Arsinal. "You will leave the stone meanwhile?"
"Yes, I promise that."
"And the time you know?"
"We were told nine."
Saltfleet was silent.
"And you ...?" Peter asked him suddenly.
"Yes, I am personally willing. …" He paused; then went on with a marked reluctance: "But I cannot let Miss Fleming's attitude pass without a warning—a remonstrance—what you like. …" He looked at Ingrid. "At this last of our conference, Miss Fleming, you are become so spiritually formidable to me—but I will not say on what account—that I could only seek the deeper truth of whatever you should choose to assert: and still, I would seek that truth. I would seek it in my own way; and perhaps that way might have little ostensible connection with your words; and perhaps the underground connection, discovered by my instinct, might be the more real. …
"The absolute value to us of happiness I do not know, but I am not without experience of the world, and I have found this: that while some persons are most benefited by happiness, others improve, rather, under one form or another of suffering; but those who react most to the happiness seem to be the softer and ignobler class of persons. Happiness, besides, is good for a particular case, but the sea waits always to sweep in; pain cannot be kept out of our lives. In erecting a dam against a misery, we are doing doubtless a very instinctive and necessary work, but we must not imagine that happiness is any the more to be ours. … Therefore, the better gift to Mr. Copping, instead of this assurance of his peace of mind to come, which neither your action nor his acceptance can translate into a permanent general condition for him... I repeat, the better gift would be the indestructible recollection that in a great crisis of his life he conducted himself greatly. …"
"Now you have rebuked me!" said Ingrid, with a flitting faint smile. "You know, however, that I could not speak of this to you, or before you."
"Arsinal and I are immediately to be off, to leave you two alone."
Peter was staring at his own feet, and frowning. He glanced up to ask Saltfleet pointedly:
"What is your disturbing interest in my future well-being?"
"I saw how it went with Miss Fleming on the Tor this morning. These transcendental changes may hardly be endured without a following confusion in all the lower faculties: accordingly, she may easily be in want of a human adviser."
"A transcendental change?"
"I judged that you were nearly at your limit." He spoke to Ingrid; who answered him:
"Straight roads are the rarest, and before the limit is reached, another time, a quite different turn may be given to everything."
"It should have been like an inpouring."
"I could not wish to be filled only, in the manner of the saints, though the world should have my spillings. To come too soon there—to heaven, I mean—is certainly to come by the wrong way. The right way is the thwarting of instincts, a sunless mind, an evil conscience... dishonour, contumely, and the like. … The unfortunate know things that have the stamp of first lessons. If the radiance of another world is to kill, in filling, me, I almost hope it may. …"
"You want distress?" asked Saltfleet.
"It seems to be the one grandeur we can grasp."
"I cannot clearly see how far you are speaking from new insight, how far from race. Fineness, daring, giving; instead of the current virtues of getting and holding: the substitution may just as well be the distillation of ancestry."
"I think that ancientness is in many men and women that one here and there may be equipped with special qualities for certain deeds."
Saltfleet said no more. Then Ingrid's face relaxed to nervelessness again, as if her strength for talking were suddenly run out. But a moment afterwards she re-knit her brows to their previous half-sternness.
"It is getting late, and you were to go. But tell me first... is it that you are more concerned in these events than other persons? ..."
"In the different senses that you are concerned, and Mr. Arsinal, and Mr. Copping... and even Drapier was... no, I do not seem to be concerned at all. I should be the one outsider. … And still undoubtedly I must be, and am, concerned. … However, it is to-day we are putting our questions, and not till to-morrow will they be answered. I am unsure whether it is because I am more concerned, or less, that I am wishing you well, Miss Fleming; but I would have helped you through a time that must be considered perilous, if I could. …"
Ingrid gazed at him silently, clasping her forehead as in trouble and confusion. He bowed to her, and left the room. Arsinal, with a grave civility to the unheeding girl, followed him.
Thus Peter and Ingrid were left standing alone.
It was felt between them that neither was she to stay, and so he did not desire her to sit. But with an odd abstracted yet nervous playing of his eyes on and off her face, he waited for the slamming of the front door, then began at once what he had to say.
"Ingrid, the girl I spoke with in the garden two days ago has disappeared, and here in her place, talking to me, is an apparition. For that you are not to blame, but the consciousness annihilates my every opening: I have twenty explanations to demand, and I cannot demand them of a ghost. But what did Saltfleet mean before?"
"About my better gift to you?"
Peter nodded.
"I think he meant, Peter, that passive submission to... a change... is too low and negative a state for a man whose life is to achieve something... that an active surrender, rather, should help him to power, and
be an undying source of power. So that I ought not to assist you to the feebler state, but to the fiercer and self-scorning and more vivid."
"To approximate to his nature, doubtless! Yet how may I surrender that which I no longer hold in keeping?"
"Until I am taken from you, I have not left you."
"But these are words, and I say that you have left me."
She remaining quiet, he added:
"Or unless Saltfleet thought so, why should he regard the precipitation of a doubtful disaster as my most helpful plan?"
"He is ignorant, fallible, as we all are. He cannot be understanding our relations. I haven't left you—of my will I couldn't leave you... but if you are able to look forward underneath tomorrow—if you can see something else there, Peter—then—"
"Words! Words! ... What! you are among the ignorant and fallible, and can take on the colour of heaven? Don't you know that your face grew bright? It was at the end of that last long silence, which must have been its preparation. No human face could be so bright without a divine informing. …"
Appearing startled to rigidness, Ingrid stared across the studio, while moments passed and Peter would not relieve the starkness of his statement. But when her eyes seemed about to seek him again, her pale lips staying closed, he asked:
"Or truly were you unaware of it?"
"I could not know that," she said, after a pause. … "It is awful. …"
"How otherwise you were altered, I can't describe. … And before—at the beginning of the silence—the same silence—a thing moved in the room that my eyes were too slow or too blind to catch. Is it any wonder that determinations have gone by the board?"
She turned, and began to drag her feet slowly from him, as though seeking escape in a dream.
"For who am I, to refuse out of the fullness of my vanity that others can have seen these portents with me? ..." But when Peter glanced aside at that familiar shapely back, his thoughts flowed on in twin streams, one alone of which became speech. Inly he assured himself how the insensate womanish frame was now nearly everything his affections still retained of her territory. Her dim incomprehensible mythical features, her eyes like the quietude before an organ-noted storm of terror, when she should move round again—they were not of the past; not his. That other supernatural brightness had been but as a wave of the incoming tide higher than the rest: already she, as to the more spiritual of her parts and instruments, was marked with the mark of separation; only her body was a vestige. …
"Saltfleet found you formidable, at least. He said so—he who can't tell a lie, and probably finds few that. Arsinal thought we had been visited. We have been visited."
Ingrid looked at him from where she stood.
"Therefore the meeting is meant."
"Yes, but it is also meant that you especially are claimed, and not for me any more."
"No one can say how it is to end."
"That woman of the Tor, whose funeral I witnessed and whose spirit appeared to you, I think this morning—she has been in the room."
"You can believe so on the ground of a strange change of colour in me?"
"Ingrid, I repeat—it was a pale brightness not of your skin but through your flesh—wholly outside nature; yet not illusion. Something was shining from behind your mind, to make you look like that. Whether it was a sign to us, watching you, or whether it was the inevitable effect of an alien divinity occupying your soul..
"Her divinity is unproved... for you, at least."
"I won't snatch at the implication. The divinity is sufficiently probable even for me. I will not name her Ourania, daughter of Ouranos, or any other name; but it is the multifariousness of these cases that lifts them out of the common psychic order, to an upper one of heaven—or nearly heaven. Heaven should indifferently, and more or less simultaneously, make use of all phenomenal forms—sensible, emotional, volitional, and fatal. A tomb was hurled open by lightning and closed by earthquake; Drapier was killed by a rock; necessary persons have been assembled in the same half-week from over the world; ancient scenes come back in shadow-play; a spirit of the dead appears; the flesh of your face burns like a moon in this very ordinary room; supernatural hints and suggestions are everywhere; arrangements are made only to be unmade, and wills are as fluid as water; the loveliest engagements break easily across the middle. … Here, I say, are the marks of heaven. …"
"What do you want, Peter?"
He recollected himself.
"But because we are animals ourselves, it is the similitude of the human animal person that must most impress our imagination and convince our reason: and so I would—if it were still possible—see the ultimate visual phenomenon with my own eyes, daring the result. … and this I want."
"To-morrow."
"If planetary art has ever stood for anything in the sight of our symbol for the highest, the grace should be conceded."
"I am not her priestess, Peter: nor if I were could I entreat her appearance, even in the name of the loneliest art. All such matters seem a universe removed from me."
"Yet, standing here not long ago, I thought this—that as many of us as are to find our account to-morrow on the Tor may know apotheosis in different modes, according to our characters and uses. …"
"Then it may be a presentiment. Indeed, if death has served Hugh Drapier, why might not illumination serve you? That his death has served him I know now: I begin to feel a great peace when I think of him. Perhaps I should feel an equal peace for your death in the eyes of the world. … Already I am much quieter about mother. She may not be required to go up at all. … No, she hasn't reconsidered," she answered Peter's raised brows, "but it is a last intuition of mine. What could she have to do at an unearthly tryst? How can she not conclude living out her simple straightforward life, either in monotony or sorrow? ... However, this talk is nothing, Peter. Let me go home. …"
He stood uncertainly, glancing away from, then at her.
"You speak of peace, Ingrid—when some of us are to swim in black waters, and Drapier, for aught you know, may by this be tumbled into new troubles. Your peace, I fear, is like the bloom on mountains: it is due to intervening distance: you are travelling from us. So my removal may show me to you deathly, when actually the quiescence would be covering the whole war against grief, wrath and despair. With such a facility you have cast the old! ... Still, it would be unjust to revile for a prime iniquity what is merely an issue. First and foremost in your soul, I suppose, is this constant horror of an approach that already causes the secondary disasters to others to appear like Buddhist blessednesses. … And we know that a drowning person will clutch at a straw; but you are scorning to consult me in anything. I must believe it is that my instinct you could have trusted has now for three days been obscured."
"We are all in ignorance. I hoped you would spare me"
"Then go. But this is not good-bye? I shan't try to see you before to-morrow evening: when, if your mother does accompany us ..." He ceased, and she came quietly closer to him.
"Because our friendship and love have stood for wonder, though now another wonder has power to forbid, you want the memory as a perfect thing... a quietly sprung-up long association, risen sharply at the last to a height, then ending in a sudden drop, like a cliff—but not vanishing into empty air, as if it had all been Hindoo magic with the concluding confessed trick. … Only, if the new displacing wonder were a new incorporeal space, and we were both in it, not as circling globes everlastingly facing one another with the same face, but as separate essences moving different ways; yet to one ultimate purpose, in one space... should not we, in that more faith-demanding sense, Peter, be still bound together—perhaps with the larger assurance that nothing any more could tear us apart? ... Peter, it isn't heartlessness that we can endure to see each other in real being, instead of against a background of emptiness. It still may not be; but if it is—"
"I very clearly understand that in your present mood you will love no one else; and with that I must be content!..
."
He went on looking at her, twitched his shoulders, and gave an unsteady bitter little smile. Ingrid said no more. After a minute Peter lit a cigarette, then moved to the door, which he threw open.
"And yet," he observed, "since the fiat has gone forth that everything in these mystic hours shall signify something else, it remains queer to my intelligence what our very brief embracing in time has stood for, and why it need have been. Certainly it cannot have been for itself. Then has it been necessary for my love to declare itself before I could find my way to the Tor with you others?"
"It may be that too." She was with him at the door. …
"I am sure that it is your support which has enabled me to face these men at all. …"
"So to-morrow, at or about eight, I shall call at the house for you and your mother, as the plan stands. They will meet us up there."
Ingrid returned an assenting answer. She desired him not to go with her downstairs: accordingly they parted on the room's threshold. But had she not slipped like a phantom past his irresolute hand, he still could not have dared to meet her flesh in farewell.
Moving slowly back to the nearer window overlooking the wasted garden at the rear, he stayed there for a time gazing out.
Chapter XXX
THE SUICIDE AT THE MONUMENT
From the top of Devil's Tor the sun was not long set. The vast sky was a weirdness of strange cloud-shapes and all the colours—vivid, sombre, delicate—from burning crimson to ambiguous green, with great expanses of still bright blue vault to show the tinted battlements and monsters interrupting them more grotesque and even portentous. In four days the weather, after painfully climbing to fineness again, was become tragic towards another storm. Ingrid and Peter stood alone on the edge of the hill farthest from the ruin, pondering in silence that unnatural splendour in the west. They were early. At the house they had settled that Ingrid should recover the flint before the others' arrival: now that it lay in the pocket of her knitted coat there were still minutes to pass. Like a living thing the sky went on changing visibly before them; the dark solidity of the away-stretching moorland was a floor to it; a wind, faint and fitful, whispered to their ears of the hour to come.
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